Ibigkas!: The Iterative Development of a Mobile Collaborative Game for Building Phonemic Awareness and Vocabular

Filipino learners’ lack of English language proficiency is a major barrier to higher education opportunities and participation in high-value industries. Computer-based learning systems have the potential to increase educational quality, equity, and efficacy in the Global South. However, a key challenge is to design systems that are developmentally and socioculturally appropriate and engaging for the target learners. In this paper, we describe the design, development, and preliminary testing of Ibigkas!, a collaborative, mobile phone-based game designed to provide phonemic awareness and vocabulary building support to Filipino learners aged 10-12

Understanding students’ use of code-switching in a learning by teaching technology

Personalized learning systems have shown significant learning gains when used in formal classroom teaching. Systems that use pedagogical agents for teaching have become popular, but typically their design does not account for multilingual classrooms. We investigated one such system in classrooms in the Philippines to see if and how students used code-switching when providing explanations of algebra problem solving. We found significant amounts of code-switching and explored cognitive and social factors such as explanation quality and affective valence that serve as evidence for code-switching motivations and effects. These results uncover complex social and cognitive interactions that occur during learning interactions with a virtual peer, and call for more affordances to support multilingual students

Towards Understanding How to Assess Help-Seeking Behavior Across Cultures

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in automatically assessing help seeking, the process of referring to resources outside of oneself to accomplish a task or solve a problem. Research in the United States has shown that specific help-seeking behaviors led to better learning within intelligent tutoring systems. However, intelligent tutors are used differently by students in different countries, raising the question of whether the same help-seeking behaviors are effective and desirable in different cultural settings. To investigate this question, models connecting help-seeking behaviors with learning were generated from datasets from students in three countries – Costa Rica, the Philippines, and the United States, as well as a combined dataset from all three sites. Each model was tested on data from the other countries. This study found that models of effective help seeking transfer to some degree between the United States and Philippines, but not between those countries and Costa Rica. Differences may be explained by variations in classroom practices between the sites; for example, greater collaboration observed in the Costa Rican site indicates that much help seeking occurred outside of the technology. Findings indicate that greater care should be taken when assuming that the models underlying AIED systems generalize across cultures and contexts

Testing the effectiveness of mathematical games as a pedagogical tool for children\u27s learning

In an effort to engage children in mathematics learning, many primary teachers use mathematical games and activities. Games have been employed for drill and practice, warm-up activities and rewards. The effectiveness of games as a pedagogical tool requires further examination if games are to be employed for the teaching of mathematical concepts. This paper reports research that compared the effectiveness of non-digital games with non-game but engaging activities as pedagogical tools for promoting mathematical learning. In the classrooms that played games, the effects of adding teacher-led whole class discussion was explored. The research was conducted with 10–12-year-old children in eight classrooms in three Australian primary schools, using differing instructional approaches to teach multiplication and division of decimals. A quasi-experimental design with pre-test, post-test and delayed post-test was employed, and the effects of the interventions were measured by the children’s written test performance. Test results indicated lesser gains in learning in game playing situations versus non-game activities and that teacher-led discussions during and following the game playing did not improve children’s learning. The finding that these games did not help children demonstrate a mathematical understanding of concepts under test conditions suggests that educators should carefully consider the application and appropriateness of games before employing them as a vehicle for introducing mathematical concepts